


Soot

by PeroxidePirate



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-29
Updated: 2010-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-13 11:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeroxidePirate/pseuds/PeroxidePirate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't understand each other, but maybe that's part of the appeal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soot

Jayat and Meryem were off poking through some of the abandoned buildings again – ostensibly in search of foodstuffs, though there was no real reason for that. We had plenty of dry beans, rice, yams, and hard cheeses at the inn already; anything perishable must surely have spoiled days ago.

I found Nory in an upstairs room. Her honey-colored hair was tied under a cloth, her clothes covered with an apron – like usual, lately. She looked up, saw it was me, and went back to what she was doing. Scrubbing the fireplace, it looked like.

"Shouldn't it be easier?" I asked her.

"What?"

"Now you only have one child to worry about, instead of a whole houseful."

"Three, counting you and Jayat."

I rolled my eyes. "We don't need worrying about."

"That's what you think."

Through this whole exchange, she was still scrubbing, some gods-awful operation involving two buckets of water in various states of cleanliness, and a seemingly infinite number of rags – which she would, I was sure, later spend a long time washing back to pristine whiteness.

"My friend Briar has a sister like you," I informed her. "She can't ever be happy unless she's fretting or worriting over something. Briar says he can get her to act like a normal person once in a while, but mostly-"

"Oh, if Briar says it." She looked up with a withering glare. "Don't you ever talk about anything that doesn't involve him somehow?"

"I can't help it," I said, defensively. "I learned a lot from him."

"I bet you did." She actually stopped scrubbing for that, and gave me this look that made it clear she was making the assumption everyone makes about Briar and me.

I gritted my teeth. "Did you know I was a street kid when I met him?" I asked.

"What?" She laughed.

"Seriously. I lived in a warren of caves at the back of Chammur, with a huge gaggle of other human beings. We were like a bunch of rabbits, eating and sleeping and... there were people breeding, having children, dying, everything, all in one place. I dug through the trash for food, ate with my fingers, never bathed. Before that I was a slave, and before that, I was the worthless daughter of a poor family with too many mouths to feed already. That's why my mother sold me." I hadn't meant to tell her so much, but I was angry, and the words just came out. "So when I say Briar taught me a lot, I mean basic stuff about how to exist around people without being an embarrassment to him and Rosethorn."

She watched me silently while I ranted, but then she glowered at me and reached into one of her buckets again. "Poor Evvy. I never knew." She stood up and started scrubbing the chimney.

"It doesn't matter," I snapped. "I've been lucky ever since. But Briar and I? It's not like that." I hadn't realized it was so important for Nory to understand.

"You've got your eye on Jayat, then?" she asked.

"Hardly," I snorted. "Anyway, he's stuck on you."

"Me?" She left the rag resting on the mantle, turning to look at me in blank surprise.

"You didn't know?"

"You're cracked," she said flatly. "Anyway, he's not my type. I'm not at all interested."

"Obviously." I found myself smirking at her.

"What does that mean?"

I wish I could be deliberately casual, like Briar, but instead I sounded sullen and angry when I said, "Nothing. Only you're so busy scrubbing soot out of someone else's fireplace, for no reason at all, that you don't even see what's right in front of your face."

We both sort of moved forward while I talked, until she was glaring at me, no more than arm's length away. "I see you," she retorted.

I still don't know what made me do the thing I did next. I reached for her, grasping her thin shoulders with both hands, and I leaned up and kissed her. She kissed back, and her arms came around my waist. She tasted like volcano ash, and the fascinating stone of the fireplace, and everything that is Starns.

"What was that for?" she asked, when we stopped. "And just look at your blouse. That will never come out."

Her apron was covered in soot; it had rubbed onto my pale green shirt where her breasts had pressed against mine.

I shrugged. The shirt was loose enough to go on without buttons. I pulled it over my head and let it drop.

She looked at me for a minute, as I stood there in my breastband and trousers. She swallowed hard. "I don't have time for this," she finally said, and – to my disgust – turned back to her buckets. "Don't leave your shirt on the floor. It'll just track soot everywhere."

"Nory."

She stayed facing the mantle, but she stopped what she was doing. "What?"

"You didn't like kissing me?"  
   
"I liked it." And that shouldn't be something she had to admit, but that's how she made it sound.

"Then why..." I fumbled for the right words. "Why not keep on?" I finally said. "I'll find a clean shirt if you want. I didn't mean to push."

"It's not that." She turned her face, resting one cheek against the stone of the chimney.

"Then what?"

"What's the point of something that's not going to last?"

"How can you know now if it will last?"

"I know the boats will arrive, and I know you'll go back to your temple, and I know I'll still be here. Oswin will come back, and I'll have the kids to take care of again, and then I really won't have time.”

"Fine," I snapped. "So that's a reason not to have anything? Nory, that fireplace isn't going to stay clean, either. Everything is temporary." Even mountains, I thought, remembering Luvo's reaction ro the threat of a volcano.

"Then what's the point?" She was almost screaming by then, and when she finally looked at me, there were tears running down her cheeks.

"Nobody knows," I said, crossing the room in about three steps. I pressed my palms to the chimney on either side of her. "But I'd sure as hell rather pretend it's this-" and I kissed her, eyes open and locked on hers "-than that." I nudged a bucket with my foot.

For a moment we just looked at each other. She was even prettier, up close.

“It's pretending,” she said. “And it won't last.”

“Yes,” I conceded. “The boats will come, and I'll go back to Winding Circle. And you'll stay, since you seem to want it that way.”

She shifted, all speed and grace, and shrugged out of her soot-covered apron. “As long as we understand each other.” She grinned.


End file.
